The Great War Article Swipe
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· 2018
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.7311/anglica/27.3
· OA: W4246842140
Its Preconditions and Missed Opportunities").The subsequent texts serve to highlight the distinction between the actual geopolitical repercussions of the Great War versus the constructions of mythopoeic national identities (Anne Samson's "The End of the 1914-1918 War in Africa" and Donna Coates's "Happy is the Land that Needs No Heroes").One cannot ignore the reasons for which inter-war (documentary and fi ctional) literary accounts written by male veterans of the Great War came to be seen as the dominant representative 'truth' of the confl ict (Martin Löschnigg's "How to Tell the War? Trench Warfare and the Realist Paradigm in First World War Narratives"), yet it is also essential to see that historical distance does not necessarily aff ect the accuracy of the depiction of the human experience of war (Nancy Sloan Goldberg's "From Barbusse to Lemaitre: The Evolution of Experience").The re-writings of the First World War in post-memory fi ction have paved the way for substantial re-interpretations of the social and political meanings of the confl ict from the perspective of fi ctional protagonists representing a range of human experiences missing from the accepted canonical war narratives (Anna Branach-Kallas's "World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels" and Rūta Šlapkauskaitė's "'Like being trapped in a drum': The Poetics of Resonance in Frances Itani's Deafening").Pertinently, our special issue thus ends with an article on post-memory forms of commemoration, so as to accentuate that the "cultural memory" of the Great War is our only venue to an understanding of what happened in 1914-1918.This 'understanding' is inevitably fi ltered through contemporary perspectives that aim to prove the ethical relevance of past representations of the war for our 'here and now.'All the articles comprising our special issue aim to answer the vital question put forth in the subtitle for this introduction, namely, why and how should we remember the Great War a hundred years after it occurred?
